I Should Have Known Better..

My mother was glamorous. Make no mistake she was drop dead gorgeous like a movie star. Other kids would love visiting so they could get a glimpse of my mom, her almost platinum hair and heavily mascaraed eyes and her huge boobs. I would then sneak them in another room and then show them her pasties and g-strings. My mother never told me you shouldn’t, only when the other parents called her on it, did I get the screaming lecture of “you should know the fuck better!”. And that’s was how our relationship would always be. She would withhold valuable information from me figuring I just should know these things. I was eight.

To make matters worse if I would pick up some gem of knowledge from TV and repeat what I had learned, she would look at me and laugh “are you crazy!? You should know better”. So I came to think that things I should “know” would just come to me, that that’s how grown ups knew so damn much. So I waited..and waited…and waited..at the ripe old age of 50-10 I have finally figured out there was so much shit my mother never told me, it makes my head spin! Knowledge of these lady things doesn’t just fall out the sky into your head…you don’t just wake up one day and “know” stuff, (oh but you wake up to find out things have just changed with no forewarning!) someone needs to avail you of their experience…women of my mothers age just didn’t talk about that stuff. Let’s be honest they didn’t even let us know they actually sat on the toilet much less dropped things in it! It was a secret thing…I mean fart? My mother? Not a snowballs chance. I thought there was something wrong with me when I had gas, seriously wrong; oh and only men belched, so jeeze what the hell was wrong with me. These are just a few of the “secrets” or knowledge that would impart itself on me quite out of the blue one day..dawn on me moments.

Perhaps women of my Mother’s era called it aging with grace, or gracefully aging. Whatever they called “it”, they should have never kept so much to themselves, there was and is valuable stuff I and many of my friends have needed to know and just didn’t. We found out the hard way. Now we share freely, excitedly and profusely as the words “WTF!? you’re kidding that happened to me too!” with no grace at all, ring in the air. Who knew? Apparently our mothers and The Beatles..